September 17, 2006
Like many current science fiction authors, Jules Verne would’ve been surprised to learn he was one. His ambitions were somewhat different. As he told Alexander Dumas, pere:
"Just as you are the great chronicler of history, I shall be the chronicler of geography."
And he proceeded to do just that. There are four recurring characters in a Jules Verne novel: air, fire, earth and water. The womb’s domain, so to speak. Verne liked to place his human characters in enclosed, self-contained, unique spaces of one kind or the other– heavier-than-air flying machines, isolated islands, floating cities, villages on tree-tops, the earth’s core, cannon-balls to the moon, steel submarines 20,000 leagues under the sea– and send them out for a spin. For the most part, his people are two-dimensional cross-hairs; their main role is keep track of places in the reader’s mind.
But there is one marvelous exception. In 1912, some forty odd years after the publication of 20,000 leagues Under The Sea, Sir Earnest Shackleton wrote in The Future of Exploration:
"…all the work of our modern oceanographers– of Sir John Murray of Challenger fame, Dr. Hjort of the Michael Sars, Prince Albert of Monaco, and of the various marine biological stations– has won less of public attention and interest than did a single one of Jules Verne’s heroes, Captain Nemo of the Nautilus. Thus does a good tale overshadow the romance of real life…."
How did Captain Nemo ever become something more than one of Verne’s story pegs? F. P. Walter provides one answer:
"…much of the novel’s brooding power comes from Captain Nemo. Inventor, musician, Renaissance genius, he’s a trail-blazing creation, the prototype not only for countless renegade scientists in popular fiction, but even for such varied figures as Sherlock Holmes or Wolf Larsen. However, Verne gives his hero’s brilliance and benevolence a dark underside–the man’s obsessive hate for his old enemy. This compulsion leads Nemo into ugly contradictions: he’s a fighter for freedom, yet all who board his ship are imprisoned there for good; he works to save lives, both human and animal, yet he himself creates a holocaust; he detests imperialism, yet he lays personal claim to the South Pole….Hate swallows him whole."
It is a plausible explanation. As Captain Nemo readies to destroy an enemy ship– of unspecified nationality– he rages at the tale’s protesting narrator in an Ahab-type outburst:
"I’m the law, I’m the tribunal! I’m the oppressed, and there are my oppressors! Thanks to them, I’ve witnessed the destruction of everything I loved, cherished, and venerated–homeland, wife, children, father, and mother! There lies everything I hate! Not another word out of you!"
But who destroyed everything Nemo loved? Which homeland? 20,000 leagues was deliberately silent on these issues. Verne had wanted Nemo to be a Polish rebel who’d participated in the January Uprising and whose family had been murdered by Tsarist Russia for that reason. But Russia happened to be a pal of France at the moment, and Verne’s editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, "persuaded" him to omit crucial details.
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September 6, 2006
The Vaio’s recent near-lobotomy experience got me thinking. It had happened because of ZoneAlarm’s inability to clean up after itself, which is nothing unusual or remarkable in the world of software. My particular situation had been well-documented, and there were only a finite set of possibilities. In the worst case, I could’ve done a clean install of WinXP. It would’ve been painful and humiliating for sure, but then, dignity has no evolutionary value. It could’ve been a lot worse.
How much worse?
Well, any virus based on any regular pattern can, in principle, be killed. Given enough time– a finite amount of time– an antidote can be devised for "stable viruses." So how about a virus that morphs into different forms, that has antigenic mutability? Something like the software equivalents of retroviruses like HIV and influenza? After all, even after millions of years of human evolution, the flu still managed to kill more people in the 20th century than the two world wars combined. In fact, the scenario can be worsened. Epidemiologists worry about designer viruses, such as Edwin D. Kilbourne‘s Maximally Malignant Virus, or the MMV. As Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child describe it in their novel, Mount Dragon:
"The MMV would have, he [Kilbourne] theorized, the environmental stability of polio, the antigenic mutability of influenza, the unrestricted host range of rabies, the latency of herpes….It would be far more devastating than a nuclear war. Why? A nuclear war is self-limiting. But with the spread of an MMV, every infected person becomes a brand-new walking bomb. And today’s transmission routes are so widespread, so quickly achieved by international travelers, it only takes a few carriers for a virus to go global."
Great doomsday stuff. But inaccurate. Epidemics starve to death. No steady supply of susceptibles, end of epidemic. Period. It’s called the Kermack-McKendrick threshold theorem. And Dr. Kilbourne is skeptical of these doomsday viruses as well. As he said in a recent interview:
"Let me just say that a virus of any kind that has a mortality rate of 50 percent is killing itself, because it will have nowhere to go if it wipes out all the hosts. So it is not in the virus’s interest to kill many people."
There’s also a major difference between infected people and infected computers. Unlike computers, people don’t neatly unzip into software and hardware. We are, as the late Dr. Robert Rosen explained, fabrications rather than simulations. The analogy between computer viruses and biological viruses may be relatively accurate, but the analogy between people and computers is fundamentally flawed.
Besides, we’ll soon have far more sophisticated techniques to fight the kind of viruses we see today. (The current strategy of running our machines like totalitarian states cannot stand. Totalitarian states are brittle. Worse, they breed for virulence by eliminating the easy, the weak and the incompetent.)
So is that it? Are we safe because we can always restore-image the disk, do a clean install, no matter how deadly the virus? Or is there a virus for which the only "cure" is to trash the machine itself?
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September 4, 2006
I spent most of the Labor day weekend trying to get the my desktop online. Excuse me, trying to get it back online. There’s a difference. It’s the difference between an eye-operation after a lifetime of blindness versus trying to re-attach a detached eye. Not that I ever had to. Re-attach an eye, I mean. But if I did, I guess it’d probably feel a lot like the last weekend. Amidst the purely mechanical aspects of the situation (horror movies make it look way too easy), there are the disquieting philosophical ones: Will the eye pop out again? Was it a feature? Or was it a "behavior-by-design" as Microsoft calls its bugs? How do you fix sight if you can’t see what to fix? If an eye pops out, and there’s no one to see it, has it really happened?
The Vaio lost its wireless connection on Friday evening. The network signal was strong (66%), the cable modem and router were blinking in all the right places, and a quick check showed that my laptop was able to connect with no difficulty. In the first ten minutes, I’d run out of 90% of the usual excuses.
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